X Marks The Spot

X marks the spot, where you are right now, at this exact moment. It is the spot where you decide that you are ready to live a life more aligned with who you are and what you want. A decision, a realization born perhaps from a loss or a change in your life. Are you ready to enjoy all the juicy bits? As much as you might like to skip ahead , x marks the spot and it is where you have to start. There will be some work to do before you have really gotten from this place to the one you are dreaming of. That’s okay, this is a part of the journey and one you will use, again and again.

I knew ten years ago that life would be changing. All the kids would be out of the house and off to school. Empty nest. I wasn’t sad about this because my personal credo was to “work myself out of a job.” In other words, ensure I had raised functioning adults who could make decisions and look after themselves. Not that I wouldn’t be there for them if they sought advice, or needed an ear, but the years of active parenting were done. So no, I wasn’t sad, rather I saw an opportunity to explore the areas of my life that were open for development.

Now the smart money is to have a plan well ahead of time, but many of us don’t. Jobs, household tasks, parenting, perhaps older parents and time mysteriously gets away. We are working for “someday” but not “today” . We postpone having the conversations or creating the goals that will get us to where we want. When someday arrives, we don’t know what to do with it.

So what do you do? Well first, be honest with yourself. The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Such as things will be better when. They won’t, trust me. Assess what is, right now. Who and what is in your life. What is working and what isn’t. If something isn’t working, why isn’t it?

Equally important, what do you enjoy and how do you create more of it or ensure it continues to exist?

When my former husband said if I wanted to take a trip south it would be on my own, he was being honest. He had no interest in such a trip or any trip outside of Canada. Telling myself that I could sell it to him in some way was not an honest representation of the situation. It wasn’t going to be better when, because he was telling me the truth.

The X spot requires truth telling

Starting from x in that scenario was to accept the truth and decide what to do with it. If that kind of travel was important to me, then despite being in a relationship, I still got to choose how to achieve it. You find the things that are important to you as an individual and those that are important to you as a couple. Then together you work equally hard on making both achievable.

Single or in a relationship, assessing where you are and what you want, lies squarely on your shoulders. Attempts to offload why you are or are not doing, or living the life you want, sets you back. In fact it prevents you from creating the life you want. If you don’t own it, you can’t have it.

The x spot will move as you make decisions towards what you want your life to be. Hopefully you will only arrive once to the thought, “is this it?” because everything after that, is up to you. It’s a matter of choice, and starting from x.